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History

Description

The Grotte du Sorcier is located at the Roc de Saint-Cirq, an impressive
cliff face in the small hamlet Saint-Cirq, halfway between Les Eyzies and Le
Bugue.
The cliff face is riddled with cave entrances and abris, many were used to built
a house inside.
The whole ensemble is renovated very carefully and the buildings are used for
the
show cave, one is the ticket office, another one contains the prehistoric
museum, one is the toilet.
Some buildings were constructed with dry walled limestone slabs, even the roof
was covered by limestone slabs without the use of mortar.

The visit to the cave includes three parts.
The first is an ascent to a hermits cell, which is called "sportivé".
Actually there is an uneven staicase with huge steps, then a second staircase
which is torn and half of it eroded away.
The handrail is a rope.
After enterin the small natural cave above, which has an artificially excavated
entrance, there is a wooden ladder in the middle of the cave.
The cave leads up to a small hole in the ceiling, only 50cm wide and 60cm high.
A crawl through this hole ends at the floor of a small quadratic chamber some 3m
wide.
It has numerous small windows and trenches with numerous sills along the walls
and below the windows.
Those sills show numerous bowl shaped excavations, whose use remains a weird
secret.
The whole room was excavated artificially from the soft Cretaceous limestone.
The use of the room remains unclear, the name used is just a modern
interpretation.
The age is most likely Medieval.

The second part is a nice museum inside one of the restored buildings.
There is a movie shown about the most important sites of cave houses in the
area, in French with english subtitles.
There are exhibits of Cretaceous fossils, stone tools, copies of famous
Paleolithic artworks, weapons, and tools.
There are even some antiques and furniture.

The third part is the cave visit.
The natural cave was a low passage, only abou one meter high, which required
crawling.
It went in horizontally for about eight meters, then down two metres and a
second horizontal part about six meters long.
Engravings can be found from the entrance almost to the end of cave.
The first part contains bisons, deers, and horses.

The second part in the lower passage contains the most interesting engravings.
The sorcerer is a human figure on a ledge, about 80cm long, with the head
to the left and the feet to the right, in an almost fetal position.
It has a huge cock and only four fingers.
The name sorcerer is probably wrong, it results from the fact that human figures
are so rare, and generally they depict shamans with animal masks.
This figure has a normal head and so it is probably no shaman at all.
But it is really exceptional as there are only 14 human reprentations known, and
this is one of only two complete figures, from head to feet.
It is also the only one which can be visited.

Nearby is a tectiform, a geometric figure resembling a roof.
And there is a bison with two female symbols.
The hind legs form a triangle standing on one point and very slender, which is
interpreted as a female vulva.
The front legs are formed like a vertical almond with a line in the middle,
which is a different, more concrete symbol of a vulva.

The cave is actually a huge chamber, nine by six meters big, with a trench at
the end.
This chamber was created artificially in the middle ages, when an abri, a
shelter, was widened to create a cave house.
The natural cave was more or less ignored, but the former floor of the cave is
at the same level as the ceiling of the dugout, so it was removed completely.
Today visistors can see the cave as a cupola at the ceiling on the right side
of the chamber.
The artificial changes have some drawbacks, some engravings have been destroyed
for holes to fix beams.
And the floor of the cave with all possibly existing archaeologic content has
also been destroyed.

The trench at the rear end allows a similar view to the engravings of the second
part of the cave.
However, the original cave floor is also destroyed and so it is not possible to
see the sorcerer from the same perspective as the prehistoric artist.
This trench is much younger and was created by the archaeologists, who
discovered numerous human remains.
It is also helpfull for the visitors, they have a better view, and in creating
some distance between visitors and the engraving it allows guided tours, which
would be impossible under more restricted conditions.